One of the signs that our republic is falling apart is the fact we are less and less willing to protect the integrity of the vote. Fortunately, we still have leaders willing to fight for our republic. Here is an email I received from Delegate Rob Bell today.

Dear Richard,

Today’s Washington Post headline: “He fought in World War II. He died in 2014. And he just registered to vote in Va.” According to the article, a JMU student in Harrisonburg registered 19 dead Virginians to vote in the 2016 election. Read it by clicking here.

This follows on a TV news report of a long-dead voters who have nonetheless cast ballots in Colorado.

Virginia is a battleground state, and every vote is important. In the General Assembly, I have long supported the photo ID requirement and other voter fraud bills. Election crimes like that in Harrisonburg prove these laws are needed.

You’d think honest elections would receive bipartisan support, but Terry McAuliffe vetoed an absentee ballot measure in 2015 and Attorney General Mark Herring refused to defend Virginia’s photo ID law against a lawsuit funded by George Soros. Virginia taxpayers had to pay private lawyers $600,000 in taxpayer money to do the job Herring was elected to do, and the case is still being considered by the federal court.

We have a political party that features “campaign finance reform” as one of its big issues. If we are supposed to believe that rich people will buy politicians, why are we not also supposed to believe that rich people will buy elections?

We are supposed to believe that voter ID is all about voter suppression. If we are willing to believe people would suppress the votes of some people, why are we not willing to believe that other people would over-count the votes they like?

Hillary Clinton is a known liar. There is no doubt about it. Even under oath she will lie and deceive. (And I see reason to debate the obvious. Look it up.) Why are we supposed to believe that a political party that would select someone as dishonest as Hillary Clinton as its presidential nominee does not have people in it who are capable of voter fraud?

14 thoughts on “DELEGATE ROB BELL ON VOTER FRAUD”

I wish we had the votes, but the problem is that that Mark Herring is doing what the people who voted for him expected him to do. Unless we have a change of heart, our preference for such dishonorable people is why our votes will soon no longer matter.

Preventing voter fraud is not a complex problem. We know how to do it. The problem is that too many people are voting for what is best for them instead of what is best for the country. That’s what results from implementing Socialism and other such Utopian ideas.

Barack Obama won twice. The first time I as disappointed. The second time I was astounded. Our elites are supporting this insanity, and most people just expect things to remain the same. They refuse to accept the responsibilities that come with citizenship; they just want the benefits.

Well, I have had relatively good choices here. Unfortunately, the candidates who have won statewide in Virginia have all been disastrous. They had relatively Conservative opponents, but they outspent their opponents, and the news media took their side. In addition, We have the HQ of the Federal Government on the other side of the Potomac, and I fear that lots of the people who work for the government vote to line their own pockets. Therefore, Virginia is leaning more and more towards Socialism.

Lots could be said here, but I’ll focus on the last bullet of the post. If the likelihood of election fraud is measured by the personal honesty of one or the other major party’s nominee, then are we not doubly vulnerable this year? However, election fraud seems to me to be an entirely different kettle of fish than the fact that neither party has a nominee who seems to have any strong moral compass when it comes to veracity. Election fraud (at least on a scale that has any real effect) requires a lot of involvement – a kind of systemic corruption that probably has taken place in pockets around the country over time (one thinks of the Jim Crow South, the Longs’ Louisiana, Tammany Hall, Daly’s Chicago). This requires a lot of involvement and probably could take place even if one or both parties’ candidates were paragons of integrity. Conversely, the lack of personal integrity in a candidate or candidates at the top of the ticket might not indicate anything about how votes get counted and recorded at local and state levels. That process could still be quite accurate, even when both candidates may be scoundrels.

I’m far more concerned about Russian or other foreign mischief in the process on a going forward basis than I am on domestic voter fraud. Fortunately, I think we are now aware of the problem of hacking and will be hardening up the election systems. But it is a very disconcerting threat.

Still crowing the Democrat party line. The reference to the Russians is funny.

In a close election, election fraud will make a difference. That is why the Democratic Party (Democrat Party would be more accurate.) doesn’t want voter ID. Voter ID is commonsense, and it is easy to set up a system that is fair to everyone, but Democrats don’t want any such system. Instead, we constantly get proposals to make voting (and fraud) easier.

If we don’t want someone hacking into our election processes, the simple solution is to keep them offline. The Internet is new. Computers are new. Elections ain’t that new.

Since they are black boxes to most people, we probably should not be using computers. It is ridiculously foolish to put those computers on the Internet.

I don’t think I said anything particularly Democrat or Republican in that last comment, Tom. I said I wasn’t clear on why there would be a link between the fact that neither candidate seems to have much personal integrity and the possibility of voter fraud, a situation that would seem to require a lot of involvement by people other than the truth averse people at the top of the ticket. Where do you get this “Democrat party line” stuff? Are the Democrats really saying the same thing? I doubt it.

As for enhanced voter ID, I don’t see any problem with it as long as it is implemented in a way that no one currently eligible to vote loses his access to the polls because they can’t get the new IDs in a timely, no-cost manner. A lot of the voter ID measures (perhaps all of them, for all I know) make no provision for promptly getting out into the electorate with the replacement IDs. The concern is that there are people (poor, elderly, for example) who can’t afford or can’t physically get in to wherever one has to go to get the new IDs. Any legislature that thinks they need to upgrade the physical credential for voting should ensure that public funds are available to fan out into the current electorate to promptly replace or supply the new IDs. Alas, I haven’t seen that happening, and I’ve talked to enough enthusiasts for new voter ID requirements in Virginia to know that at least some of them do indeed think it is a very slick way to “cull the herd” of current eligible voters who tend, demographically, to vote for the Dems. We can save for another time the recent unsettling issue of how a political party that is afraid of the electorate can thrive and be an effective proponent of ideas.

Of course, we can spend a lot of time and money talking about photo ID or other enhanced credentialing, but the fact of the matter is that voters impersonating other eligible voters not doesn’t appear to happen in any statistically significant way (I saw a study recently that analyzed the frequency of such a phenomenon over a period in which a billion votes were cast in the US. The number of identified voter-impersonation cases was, as I recall, in the tens). It’s easy to understand why this isn’t a problem. Think how difficult it would be to organize an effort by the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people to pretend to be someone else and vote someone else’s identity on a scale sufficient to affect the result of a national election.

The bigger problem is that we have such a decentralized system that voter rolls are not trued up to reflect people moving and dying. You’d think it would be relatively easy to find a link to everyone else’s rolls so that when a person registers in one state, he or she is removed from his/her previous state. Same with linking death certificates. That’s just messy. I doubt that we have a statistically significant number of people who vote in more than one jurisdiction

It’s interesting that you find the Russian meddling funny. I am not particularly amused and, if it appears to be anything other than just dabbling by Mr. Trump’s 400 pounders in their beds in Omsk, I consider it tantamount to a physical attack on the United States. You can giggle if you like. One hopes that there are some serious, knowledgeable grown-ups in positions of authority in this country who are working through an effective response.

I just find the notion of Democrats complaining about the Russians interfering in our elections hilarious. And their fix? Nationalizing the system. Yeah! Instead of a cranky decentralized system, we will put H. Clinton or Obama in charge of it.

There is an old saying. The devil is in the details. Like you Democrats are really quite anxious to fix voter fraud problems, except for the fact they cannot find a fix they can approve and they really don’t see a problem.

Perpetually confused, aren’t you, Tom? You find some of my views not to be congruent with yours, and the best you can do to engage is to call me, counter-factually, a Democrat. As if that explains anything.

Oh well, being a patient man, I’ll continue to work with you on that.

No, I don’t particularly favor “nationalizing” the electoral system, nor have I hear Democrats or Republicans advocate that. This is another one of your boogie-man inventions. In fact, the decentralization of our election system may, in fact, make it more difficult for foreign adversaries to disrupt. But I do think that the issue of foreign powers poking around in our electoral records should be something that all elements of the political spectrum in the United States should find very concerning, not “funny”, as you have said you do. This kind of threat requires an adaptive response on a technological basis, and the response is not one that depends on whether Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump or President Obama is in charge.

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.” Ronald Reagan.